Archive for November, 2006

It appears that while construction is going on at John Adams Community College on Masonic/Hayes, they are looking to relocate students and faculty to DeAvila Elementary on Haight (b/t Masonic and Central).

Problem is, they have no parking available for the 2000+ students and 150 faculty.

They’d like all of the kind folks who drive to school to continue to park over at Masonic/Hayes and walk or take a shuttle, but that’s pretty unrealistic.

In any event, there’s a public meeting on this topic on Thursday, November 30th at DeAvila Elementary (1351 Haight @ Masonic) at 7pm.

And from the Haight Ashbury Beat,

Previously, City College had hoped to temporarily move into the Newcomer High School building in Pacific Heights, but the plan was rejected after a neighborhood group howled about potential traffic and parking problems. Additional plans for occupying Laguna Hills High School also fell through.“If we didn’t have DeAvila I don’t know what we would do,” said Linda Squires Grohe, dean of City College’s John Adams campus.

According to Grohe, the parking issue is minimal since over 70 percent of students who attend the John Adams campus take public transportation. City College also plans on keeping the parking lots north of the Panhandle open to students. [more…]

There’s obviously a strong NIMBY-ism to all of this, but at the same time, people’s daily lives will be heavily impacted. I live near John Adams, so I guess the streets around my house will get a temporary respite…

Apparently, according to the Haight Ashbury Beat, the district intends to lease the DeAvila building to City College through the 2007-2008 school year.

First, I’m back from a much-needed vacation. I’m reminded how darn cold it is in SF in November, even when it’s sunny…

And on the housing front, the Examiner ran a story on Monday about how the Association of Bay Area Governments is asking SF to pull their own weight and create their fair share of housing. What a concept.

Problem is, they don’t want to. Not to mention that they are THOUSANDS of units behind their last mandate from 2002.

From the Examiner,

San Francisco is protesting a new method by which Bay Area cities and towns will be asked to create new housing, in part because it would double the amount The City is recommended to build.

The method, announced by the Association of Bay Area Governments Nov. 17, creates a new way of assigning “housing responsibility” — quotas for new housing — to different cities and counties, according to ABAG spokeswoman Kathleen Cha.

To ensure that market-rate and low-income housing keeps up with population growth, California law has since 1984 required regional agencies, such as ABAG, to mandate how many new units individual cities must build. It also requires individual cities to outline how they will meet those goals — although it does not actually require cities to build housing, according to Cha.

For the first time, ABAG will create those quotas based on economic growth — those cities showing signs of job and residential growth near major transit corridors will be assigned a higher housing responsibility.

For San Francisco, ABAG will boost local quotas for the creation of new housing — which were 20,000 between 2002 and 2009 — to 40,000 between 2009 and 2016, according to San Francisco Planning Department representative Sarah Dennis. In the past seven years, The City has struggled to meet its allocation, creating only 13,000 new units by the end of 2005.

“We would be looking at 5,000 or 6,000 units a year, which San Francisco has never seen,” Dennis said. “It’s hard to imagine, especially at a time when the market is cooling off.” [more…]

Who cares if the market is cooling off? What better time to find developers looking for incentives to build? Why would a developer want to build more affordable housing in a booming market?

Where’s the logic here?

Other than the fact that everyone knows of the perpetual banging-one’s-head-against-the-wall when it comes to discussing the creation of new housing with our Board of Supervisors… Heaven forbid one of the districts (other than Daly-ville) would see some new construction.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Build more housing! All types of housing! All over the city!

And if the market ends up being flat for a while, more supply will only help people get into the market.

But just like a spoiled child, San Francisco doesn’t like to be told what to do…

Just got a couple of flyers in the mail today announcing the plans and timelines for the below-market (affordable) units in the new Fillmore Heritage Center. This development is located at 1300 Fillmore @ Eddy in the historic Fillmore Jazz District.

The SFUrbanCHC appears to have been created by the folks behind HSM Realty (HSM stands for Haight Street Mortgage), which is a family-owned real estate company that’s been around for 50 years, the same folks who appear to be running the sales office for the Fillmore Heritage Center.

Anyhow, there are a bunch of workshops coming up in December for first time homebuyers who might be interested in getting into the affordable units in this development.

There are workshops on December 7th and December 9th at the African American Art and Culture Complex @ 762 Fulton Street, but you must RSVP. Go to http://sfurbanchc.org/ for more info. Unfortunately, there’s no specific info on these workshops on the site, but they also have a phone number on the flyer, which is 415-252-0949.

The application deadline isn’t until February 3, 2007, but as you probably know, you’ll need to attend some meetings and jump through some hoops if you want in on this deal.

Can anyone be proud of a politician whose motto that they bring to work every day is ‘Fuck You‘? What about when their whole family (at least the family members who are old enough to talk) has the same motto? And they all voice it publicly?

How is it that the rest of us would lose our jobs instantly (even if we work for ourselves, we’d ruin our reputations forever) with behavior like that, yet 7,241 people think that he’s the best man for the job in D6 after six years of this?

At least current property owners outside of District 6 can look on the bright side: Daly will continue to restrict housing, fight with all of the other supervisors, and generally make it difficult for people to become homeowners. This will only help property values in the other districts.

The streets in D6 (of which many of the new residents have nobody to blame but themselves now) will stay filthy. Drug dealers rejoice! And all of this will just drive new owners and renters into the rest of the city, where very little new construction is happening and very little supply is available.

Ultimately, it’s a sad day in San Francisco for the 700,000+ residents of San Francisco that could not vote in D6, yet will have to deal with the citywide impact that Daly’s behavior will have for the next four years…